Although few people are aware of it, ICANN and the domain name system are on the front lines of the transnational data governance issues raised by the clash between European privacy law and American (and eventually Chinese and Indian) information industries. Prompted by Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ICANN...
On August 5, 2020, the U.S. mounted a systematic attempt to splinter the global Internet. It released a policy that tries to leverage US information services providers to force the rest of the digital economy to indiscriminately exclude Chinese businesses. The US “Clean Path” initiative, announced in April of this...
Just over a year after the U.S. government placed restrictions on China's Huawei, the ongoing economic rivalry between the two countries has found a new target. For weeks the Trump administration has hinted that it is considering banning TikTok, the short video app over national security concerns. With over 2...
This blog, the second of three parts, is a preliminary look at Day 2 of the Internet Governance Project’s (IGP) 5th Annual Workshop on “Building transnational cyber-attribution”. The workshop virtually brought together more than two dozen international researchers and practitioners in May to explore making attributions based on facts and...
This has been a grim week for the Internet. While nothing in the following article will be news to anyone who follows Internet governance, it is worthwhile to look at these events together, as part of a pattern: China imposed a repressive National Security Law on Hong Kong India forced...
More than a year ago, ICANN adopted a policy that redacted sensitive domain name registration data from public view to bring Whois into compliance with GDPR. The key data elements shielded were registrant email addresses and street addresses. The loss of free, unrestricted access to all DNS registration data was a...
The Internet Governance Project (IGP) at Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy has maintained a consistent interest in addressing the challenges of attribution in cyberspace through transnational cooperation. This topic has been explored through IGP’s presentations on the need for an international attribution institution at RightsCon 2018, the North American...
Few social scientists have advanced studies at the intersection of information technology and security as much as Thomas Rid. His 2011 book, Cyber War Will Not Take Place, analyzed cyber conflict from a critical point of view, shattering the myth that actual wars would be fought and won through cyber...
Yesterday and today IGP is holding its 5th annual workshop. The topic is "Building Transnational Cyber-Attribution." The program for the event can be seen here. The following are my opening remarks, in which I put our cyber-attribution efforts into the broader context of contemporary geopolitical conflict. Repeating a cycle? There...
Yesterday the ICANN Board refused to approve the sale of the .ORG registry to Ethos Capital. This is being hailed as a great victory for the public interest by some, and as a lamentable “failure to follow ICANN’s bylaws, processes, and contracts” by the parties to the proposed sale. In fact, it is...
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”
